The colonel made a book of his Stapyltonian researches which he vaingloriously proclaimed to be the stupidest reading within the ample field of uninteresting printed English.  Patricia was allowed to see no word of it until the first ten copies had come from the printer’s, very splendid in green “art-vellum” and stamped with the Stapylton coat-of-arms in gold.

She read the book.  “It is perfectly superb,” was her verdict.  “It is as dear as remembered kisses after death and as sweet as a plaintiff in a breach-of-promise suit.  Only I would have preferred it served with a few kings and dukes for parsley.  The Stapletons don’t seem to have been anything but perfectly respectable mediocrities.”

The colonel smiled.  At the bottom of his heart he shared Patricia’s regret that the Stapylton pedigree was unadorned by a potentate, because nobody can stay unimpressed by a popular superstition, however crass the thing may be.  But for all this, an appraisal of himself and his own achievements profusely showed high lineage is not invariably a guarantee of excellence; and so he smiled and said: 

“There are two ends to every stick.  It was the Stapletons and others of their sort, rather than any soft-handed Musgraves, who converted a wilderness, a little by a little, into the America of to-day.  The task was tediously achieved, and without ostentation; and always the ship had its resplendent figure-head, as always it had its hidden, nay! grimy, engines, which propelled the ship.  And, however direfully America may differ from Utopia, to have assisted in the making of America is no mean distinction.  We Musgraves and our peers, I sometimes think, may possibly have been just gaudy autumn leaves which happened to lie in the path of a high wind.  And to cut a gallant figure in such circumstances does not necessarily prove the performer to be a rara avis, even though he rides the whirlwind quite as splendidly as any bird existent.”

Patricia fluttered, and as lightly and irresponsibly as a wren might have done, perched on his knee.

“No! there is really something in heredity, after all.  Now, you are a Musgrave in every vein of you.  It always seems like a sort of flippancy for you to appear in public without a stock and a tarnished gilt frame with most of the gilt knocked off and a catalogue-number tucked in the corner.”  Patricia spoke without any regard for punctuation.  “And I am so unlike you.  I am only a Stapylton.  I do hope you don’t mind my being merely a Stapylton, Olaf, because if only I wasn’t too modest to even think of alluding to the circumstance, I would try to tell you about the tiniest fraction of how much a certain ravishingly beautiful half-strainer loves you, Olaf, and the consequences would be deplorable.”

“My dear——­” he began.